Get Ready! It's Time for Karan Eri's Greatest Performance!
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: [Appli Monsters] She wants to make people smile, not scare them into tears. - Eri


**A/N:** Written for the

Digimon bingo, the non-flash version, #017 - reverse  
Diversity Writing Challenge, b49 - write about gaining an understanding for something

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 **Get Ready! It's Time for Karan Eri's Greatest Performance!**

She wants to make all the spectators smile. And maybe it's easier because there are friends in the crowd. Maybe it's easier because there's a fan in the crowd, someone she's been able to encourage from the distant place of her screen and stage.

And maybe it's harder too. Harder because of all that chaos but easier too because it's kindled the fire of determination under her feet, stronger than it had been before. And it had already been kindled once: with her new friend, her new fan, the first person who's shown her the very thing she's wanted to achieve with her time and now this is another chance, but a chance on the background of strangers looking up to her with trepidation.

She's on a coloured stage. Copymon has coloured it quite thoroughly for her but she's dealt with that and it was heartwarming at the end when Dokamon fought for her embarrassment and shame and that restless anger brewing in her to swallow up her excitement. And she wonders how she could have been so reluctant to engage with him before. Her life's changed so much since they bonded, since Haru came into her life and brought the trouble along -

Maybe she should be mad at Haru for that, because she's also gotten into a lot of trouble thanks to the Appmon and it's rarely purely Dokamon's fault, or her's. And mostly it is Haru or Gatchmon or the both of them leading the rest headlong into trouble and that's kind of funny because he's the most ordinary of them.

He won't be forever. She's sure of that. He's clever and he devours books so fast and maybe it's because he's in Japan and Japan's education system is so intricate that he can't escape it early. In another place, he might've been one of those genius kids who'd be at university at now. He could be like that girl in India: a doctor at fifteen. Or like that boy from Austria: a Nobel Prize winner at eighteen. And he'd been a doctor from fourteen or fifteen or something like that as well, hadn't he? She's seen so many such names on the news but she doesn't remember them all too well because they're so distant, so remote, and they're not the sort of things that would make a complete stranger smile as they watch. They could, maybe, if they wanted to, but the boy who won the Nobel Prize? He won it curing his sister. Self-centred in her view, even if it wound up having far wider implications. The people who go off to war-torn countries to help out (and some of them die out there anonymously) and without any pay or reward except the smiles of the people they help…Those are the ones deserving of the reward. And she can easily imagine Haru being one of those people too. Heck, he could be the genius who finds the cure to Ebola while helping out with the endemic in Africa.

He can also be one of those people who go out to help alone and contracts it and dies without a single person recognising his efforts, and she can see that happening as well.

But that's why she likes him. Why she'll stand with him. Maybe she can't fight Ebola but they're fighting Appmon right now, not the world's medical problems and she can fight those. He'll fight alone if he has to but they're stronger as a team and she'll stand with him, because she doesn't want him to be one of those good people who die on the wayside for no good reason when they can be so much more. That's the role she's taken on, after all. To make people smile. To make people stand up together and live life to the fullest and to scream at the world as loudly as they can so their voices echo even after they're not saying the words anymore.

And then Copymon throws a wrench in the works and she's still mad about that. And her audience is, on the whole, a little cautious after seeing her face plastered all over the media and her heart is still reeling from that as well. They know it's not her, her manager says. They know she's not to blame but it doesn't change the fact that Copymon plastered her face out there and now she has to override it - override the suspicious way they wait and are waiting for images everywhere to go out of control again.

And now she's got competition. She needs to shine brighter than the people Copymon pasted her face onto. She needs to shine bright enough to turn those downturned lips into smiles and shining eyes. Maybe it'll be a good thing because there are so many more eyes on her now than she'd expected and that's more people she can reach, more people she can affect - like Izumi-san had, that one fateful day so long ago, influenced her.

It's her turn to give a life-changing performance and she's going to light them on fire like the fire in her own heart, and it's the brightest it's ever head.

 _Get ready! It's time for Karan Eri's greatest performance!_


End file.
